Five Black Americans Who Deserve Monuments

While our country has dedicated plenty of our monuments to many great African Americans in various cities and towns, there are still a host of individuals who made a tremendous impact in this country who have yet to be honored in this manner.

Here’s a list of five individuals we feel deserve this honor.

5. 4 Little Girls — Birmingham, Alabama.

Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair were 14-year-old girls who were spending a Sunday morning in church in 1963 when a bomb killed them. The bomb was planted by white supremacists from the Ku Klux Klan meant to frighten Black people from being involved with the civil rights movement.

A monuments for these girls would be a reminder of the cruelty and evil of racism as well as the good, young and innocent who fought and continue to fight it.

4. Fannie Lou Hamer

Hamer famously led the delegation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the Democratic National Convention in 1964, which led to the Democratic Party’s support for Civil Rights and several southern racist Democrats leaving the party.

3. James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson was a great author, leader and activist. He wrote the Negro National Anthem, “Left Every Voice,” wrote “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” and worked with W.E.B. DuBois to fight lynching with the NAACP.

A true renaissance man, Weldon should be honored with his own statue.

Too often he is forgotten among the list of Black leaders who fought against racism. A monument should help solve that problem.

2. Stokely Carmichael

Stokley Carmichael was a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was a very powerful civil rights organizer.

He would later help with the Black Power movement, becoming “Honorary Prime Minister” and later would become an icon to the Pan Africanist movement, moving to Ghana and changing his name to Kwame Ture.

As an icon to generations of Black activism, Carmichael needs a statue of his own.